Documentum – Unable to install xCP 2.3 on a CS 7.3

Beginning of this year, we were doing our first silent installations of the new Documentum stack. I already created a few blogs to talk about some issues with CS 7.3 and xPlore 1.6. This time, I will talk about xCP 2.3 and in particular the installation on a CS 7.3. The Patch of xCP as well as the patch for the CS 7.3 doesn’t matter since all versions are affected. Please just note that the first supported patch on a CS 7.3 is xCP 2.3 P03 so you shouldn’t be installing a previous patch on 7.3.

So, when installing an xCP 2.3 on a Content Server 7.3, you will get a pop-up in the installer with the following error message: “Installation of DARs failed”. You will only have an “OK” button on this pop-up which will close the installer. Ok so there is an issue with the installation of the DARs but what’s the issue exactly?

It is mentioned that three DARs failed to be installed but since there are three docbases here, that’s actually one DAR per docbase. The only interesting information we can find from the install log file is that some DARs were installed properly so it’s not a generic issue but more likely an issue with one specific DAR. The next step is therefore to check the log file of the DAR installation:

With the above, we know that the only failed DAR is the BPM.dar and it looks like we have the reason for this: the DAR needs a user named “dm_bps_inbound_user” to proceed with the installation but couldn’t find it and therefore the installation failed. But actually that’s not the root cause, it’s only a consequence. The real reason why the DAR installation failed is displayed in the first line above.

For some reason, a function couldn’t be executed because not defined properly. This function is the one that is supposed to create the “dm_bps_inbound_user” user but with a CS 7.3 this function cannot be executed properly. As a result, the user isn’t created and then the DAR installation fail. For more information, you can refer to the BPM-11223.

This issue will – according to EMC – not be fixed in any patch of the xCP 2.3, even if this issue has been spotted quickly after the release of the xCP 2.3. Therefore, if you want to avoid this issue, you will have to wait several months for the xCP 2.4 to be released (not really realistic ;)) or you will need to create this user manually before installing the xCP 2.3 on a CS 7.3. You don’t need special permissions for this user and you don’t need to know its password so it’s rather simple to create it for all installed docbases in a few simple commands: